Lufthansa’s board has approved plans to expand its low-cost subsidiary Eurowings as it battles to remain competitive against rival budget carriers such as Ryanair and Gulf operators including Emirates, Etihad and Qatar.
The German carrier will equip Eurowings with 23 Airbus A320 aircraft by 2017, which will operate on direct services in Europe.
Eurowings currently operates as a regional carrier in Germany but plans to operate routes from a base outside the country with services throughout Europe from late next year.
Lufthansa will also start low-cost intercontinental services in partnership with SunExpress, its joint–venture with Turkish Airlines. It will initially lease three used Airbus A330-200s and flights to tourist destinations in Florida, South Africa and the Indian Ocean will start at the end of 2015 from Cologne.
“For several years now we’ve been facing fierce competition from the rapidly-growing low-cost carriers in the point-to-point travel segment, not only in Germany but throughout Europe, too,” said Lufthansa CEO Carsten Spohr in a statement.
“And we are sure to see this competition extend more and more to the long-haul travel segment in the years ahead. Our ‘new Eurowings’ is our innovative response, which will enable us to fashion our own markets here,” he added.
The new ‘Eurowings’ concept follows the transfer of Lufthansa’s non-hub routes to Lufthansa Group subsidiary Germanwings. The program of transferring all Lufthansa routes not serving its Frankfurt and Munich hubs should be completed in early January 2015.
The announcement follows this week’s two-day day walkout that forced Lufthansa to cancel half of its flights, affecting 150,000 passengers, pilots’ union Vereinigung Cockpit has called another strike for today (December 4) hitting many long-haul services.
Lufthansa.com